Resuscitation treatments for patients suffering from cardiac arrest generally include clearing and opening the patient's airway, providing rescue breathing for the patient, and applying chest compressions to provide blood flow to the victim's heart, brain and other vital organs. If the patient has a shockable heart rhythm, resuscitation also may include defibrillation therapy. Such treatment may include basic life support (BLS), which involves initial assessment; airway maintenance; expired air ventilation (rescue breathing); and chest compression. When all these elements are combined, the term cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is used. Relatively untrained rescuers, such as laypeople, may provide BLS, while trained rescuers such as physicians or emergency medical technicians (EMTs) may provide advanced life support (ALS), which may additionally involve, among other things, cardiac monitoring, intravenous cannulation (IV), intraosseous (IO) access and intraosseous infusion, surgical cricothyrotomy, needle cricothyrotomy, and advanced medication administration through parental and enteral routes.
Ventilation in various instances may involve rescue breathing, or more commonly, bag or bag-valve-mask ventilation for ALS, which involves placing a mask in a seal over a patient's face and forcing air into the patient's lungs by repeatedly compressing and expanding a flexible device that is attached to the mask. Such ventilation may be performed in time-wise coordination with chest compressions and with defibrillation shocks delivered by a defibrillator, such as a portable defibrillator in the form of an automatic external defibrillator (AED) or other types of defibrillators. The chest compression can be automatically coordinated by the defibrillator, such as by the provision of an accelerometer positioned relative to the defibrillator electrodes on a patient's chest so that the accelerometer can be used to provide a rescuer with feedback if they are compressing too hard or too soft, and too fast or too slow, as compared to set standards and protocols.